Franco Fortunato’s Mythic and Mystical Moby-Dick

Although outstanding illustrated and comic book editions of Moby-Dick have been created by Italians, to my knowledge Franco Fortunato is the only Italian to have created a series of free-standing artworks inspired by Moby-Dick.¹ As a boy of ten, Fortunato went with his father in 1956 to see John Huston’s film version of Moby-Dick in Rome.² Images from the movie haunted him, leading him years later to read Melville’s novel and in 2005 to create a series of pictures related to the novel, ranging in size from very small to 70 by 140 centimeters. Despite his familiarity with Moby-Dick’s compelling, surging narrative in the film, Fortunato’s images, from his early pen-and-ink sketches and pastels to his finished oil paintings, seem to stop time, taking viewers into an ahistorical and apolitical, a mythic and mystical world.³

Fortunato’s images of Moby-Dick, while evoking events and characters from Melville’s novel, are far removed from the dramatic images of Huston’s film and most Moby-Dick illustrations by other artists. Fortunato ignores pivotal action scenes in the narrative, such as the quarter-deck scene, the meetings between Ahab and various crew members of his crew during the voyage of the Pequod, the crew’s interactions, the Pequod’s gams, and significantly the concluding confrontation with the great white whale. Whereas Moby-Dick illustrators conventionally create a portrait gallery of the Pequod’s mates and harpooners based on the two “Knights and Squires” chapters, Fortunato omits all portraiture from his Moby-Dick series, with the exception of several images of Ahab, two of Ishmael and Queequeg together, and one sketch of Daggoo. Although his Moby-Dick images allude to the realistic, narrative tradition of Moby-Dick illumination, they deviate from it significantly, creating a luminously new way of seeing the novel and allowing viewers to experience Melville’s novel as veering toward the mystical and the mythic.

Fortunato shares an interest in a mythic sensibility with the mid-twentieth-century American abstract painters of Moby-Dick—Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, and Sam Francis—all of whom were interested in psychological readings of the novel (Schultz 133–42). Like these painters, Fortunato defies conventional subject matter and downplays Melville’s cetacean and nautical world, instead challenging his viewers’ conventional perceptions of reality through his vision of the novel. Unlike the abstract expressionists, Fortunato places recognizable objects in a spare, balanced, geometrical, and often fantastical representation of reality. Undoubtedly, Fortunato’s deepest inspiration is derived from Italian art, in particular the works of the fourteenth-century Italian painters Giotto and Lorenzetti (Madioni 6). Like his aesthetic forbears, Fortunato establishes the significance of selected images in seemingly bounded space and endless time by depending on spare details and a minimum of vivid colors. He shares with these early artists a palette of saturated primary colors that reveals a partiality for heavenly blue, which he extends to both sea and sky, giving his Moby-Dick paintings an ethereal quality. Like the fourteenth-century Italians, his figures and designs are rendered with clear outlines in bold simplicity, a technique that simultaneously emphasizes their singularity and commonality. Fortunato’s paintings also evoke the work of early twentieth-century artists: the haunting stillness of Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist paintings and his composed, mannequin-like representations of Melville’s characters recalling the elongate figures in Amadeo Modigliani’s work.

Like these divergent Italian artists, Fortunato organizes space by balancing geometrical forms—circles, squares, rectangles—inside the frames of his Moby-Dick paintings with his arrangement of these forms contributing to the paintings’ sense of stasis. Balance is emphasized in many of his works through emphatic horizontals—docks, walls, the horizon separating sea and sky—or through objects carefully placed to suggest equilibrium. Images of the Pequod under sail, for example in Come una chioccia selvaggia (“Like a Savage Mother Hen”) are divided into sections, with the ship’s bowsprit and mast providing a strong vertical down the middle of the painting that creates rectangles of the sails and hull while a definitive...